So if you are super paranoid about Google knowing everything about you, this post may not be good for your blood pressure. If, however, you like being able to see your activity using Google products and services on any give day, the new My Activity site is for you. And frankly, it is pretty darn cool. For each day you can see a breakdown of the apps, services and other content that you have done on any given day. It is literally a minute-by-minute breakdown. You can see your search history, the website you have visited, the apps you have used, the YouTube videos you have viewed. You get the idea: If you give Google access to this information, it is in there in impressive detail.
In all, there are 20 different services or sites that Google culls for information and then presents it to you in the My Activity site. Here is the rundown:
Google My Activity
- Ads
- Android
- Books
- Chrome
- Developers
- Express
- Finance
- Goggles
- Help
- Image Search
- Maps
- News
- Now
- Play
- Play Music
- Search
- Shopping
- Video Search
- Voice & Audio
- YouTube
The idea, of course, is to help you find that site or service you used but can’t quite remember the details of if it was in an app or on the web. Now you can search that history, including keywords, to find it. Think of it as Search on steroids – it searches everything in the list above to find your history for you.
Like many of the Google services, you can prevent Google from gaining this information on you (nothing is 100% anonymous from any search provider) through the privacy settings on your account.
Give it a look and see what you think. Personally, think there is a wealth of information here that could be quite helpful. But equally, I can see where some paranoid folks could find this a bit unnerving.
